Late 2009 MacBook excruciatingly slow

As @TheLittles mentioned, you have a hardware issue with your hard drive as the read & write speed terribly bad even for a hard drive. This is not unexpected for such an old hard drive.

In addition to the failing hard drive, you also have some unnecessary third party software installed which will interfere with the normal operation of macOS. There is no need to have the Intego anti-virus software or Tunnelbear VPN software. Unless you are connecting to a known VPN service for your bank, school, or employer, or other very specific location you trust, a VPN will not provide the protection you think it will, although it may allow you to appear at another location if you are trying to bypass regional restrictions. As for anti-virus software, cleaning/optimizer apps, and third party security software....none of these are needed on a Mac as they usually cause more problems than they solve because they all interfere with the normal operation of macOS and can cause performance issues as well. macOS already provides great built-in security especially when combined with the user practicing safe computing practices as outlined in this excellent article written by a respected forum contributor:

Effective defenses against malware and other threats - Apple Community

If you want to continue using this laptop, then you will need to replace the hard drive with an SSD. With an older computer like this many SSDs may not be compatible since this laptop only has a SATA II controller for the internal drive. Some SSDs will have trouble auto negotiating the link speed even though theoretically any SSD should be backwards compatible with this laptop...SSD vendors seem to have problems with this for some reason. Our organization has used the Crucial MX500 SSDs in some of the older Macs such as the 2010 model which is very similar to your Late 2009 model, but you will want to avoid the Crucial BX500 SSD as it is a terrible SSD which can be extremely slow, tends to overheat, and has a high rate of failure. An OWC Mercury Electra 3G SSD may even be a safer option since it utilizes a SATA II controller (that is what the 3G indicates as that is the max throughput for SATA II).

I hope you have a backup of your data since you will likely find it very difficult pulling data from that failing hard drive as that drive must be having tons of errors.

Definitely make sure to always have frequent and regular backups when using an SSD since SSDs can fail at any time without any warning signs (even a brand new SSD). Plus it is impossible to recover accidentally deleted data from an SSD after the Trash has been emptied. People should always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data...no matter what type of drive is being used.

Run this analyzer and post the results here:

Etrecheck - http://www.etrecheck.com/

Using Etrecheck - Using EtreCheck - Apple Community

Extra tips about settings to have it check all parts of your computer, and how to post long reports to the Apple Support Communities window: desktop mac running very slow - Apple Community

dariuchi wrote:

If the hard drive is failing, how could I corroborate that this is true?

You can run DriveDx to check the health of the drive. Any "Warning" or "Failing" notices mean the hard drive is worn out or has a hardware issue respectively. You can post the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. I expect we will see a large number of reallocated sectors and pending sectors as well as the Load Cycle Count being beyond the manufacturer expectations (although the latter does not mean a bad drive, in my own experience hard drives tend to have odd intermittent issues and performance issues at that point).

And which method would be faster to start backing up the data to a physical storage device?

Fastest method would have been to back up the computer when it was healthy. I'm actually surprised the computer even boots to that hard drive. I have doubts whether you will be able to transfer the files as the drive is most likely producing a ton of errors which will cause macOS all sorts of issues since macOS doesn't handle drive errors well. I would suggest using the third party app Carbon Copy Cloner to attempt to transfer items, but think your drive failure is beyond anything that you can do within macOS even with CCC (I would still only copy a small number of folders at a time). I highly recommend you boot into Safe Mode if you decide to use macOS or CCC to attempt transferring your data as it will prevent third party software from automatically launching during boot & login to less the strain on the failing drive. If the drive failure is as severe as I suspect, then I don't recommend even attempting any recovery method involving the use of macOS.

When I attempt data recovery for failing hard drives with severe failures, I will first attempt to make a low level bit for bit (or block for block) clone of the failing drive to known good drive of equal or larger size. I do this with a command line utility GNU ddrescue which is able to bypass the portions of the hard drive with errors to concentrate on getting data from the good parts of the drive, then later on trying to copy from the bad portions of the drive. However, this process will usually end up destroying what is left of the hard drive. Unless it is able to recover a significant portion of the drive, you will probably not end up with any usable data. Even if you can successfully clone a large part of the drive, you may still need to repair the file system or even use a standard macOS data recovery app as well....many times a data recovery app may leave you with 100K un-named files which you will need to sort through to figure out which ones are your important data files.

To use GNU ddrescue will require booting from a Linux drive (macOS cannot handle the drive errors and will interfere with the cloning process) and using the command line to operate the utility. It is very easy to make a mistake on the command line by mixing up the source and destination drives. I've successfully recovered data from hundreds of failing hard drives, but I seriously doubt even this method will be successful with your hard drive, but maybe the DriveDx health report will show some hope that the failure is not as bad as I suspect.

If these files are really important, then I highly recommend you contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers. They provide free estimates and are recommended by Apple and other OEMs.

You will only get one chance at recovering data from a failing hard drive so make sure to choose wisely since any attempts at data recovery will make the drive failure worse...even using the drive like you have been doing is making it more & more difficult for data recovery.

I have a couple MicroSD cards with an adapter that I could use. I know it's not ideal but I would just back up the data and move to another Macbook. Thanks

I think those cards may be much faster than your failing hard drive. I highly recommend you contact Drive Savers if the data is important.

Also, the mention of upgrading to an SSD....an SSD will be much faster than any hard drive, but the SSD will still run more slowly on this laptop due to the limitation of the SATA II controller of the laptop which limits maximum transfer speeds to about 250MB/s (aka 3Gb/s). An SSD will definitely make this laptop perform much better than even when it was new, but it is still an old computer with an outdated OS where it won't be long before none of the popular web browsers will be supported.

dariuchi Said:

"Late 2009 MacBook excruciatingly slow: For the past few weeks my Late 2009 MacBook has become slower by the day. Now it's unbearable. [...]What could be wrong?[...]"

-------

Obsolete Device Being the Culprit:

Hardware ages while used, and that has most certainly what has occurred.

dariuchi wrote:

Do you know what other programs are unnecessary from what you can see on the report? I will delete everything I don't need from what I see on the Applications folder. But are other things hidden from that folder that I should delete so it doesn't interfere/slow it down?

Those two apps are the only ones that stand out which would cause problems and are not useful as mentioned.